Does gender matter in the civil law judiciary ? Evidence from French child support court decisions

Bruno Jeandidier (1) , Cécile Bourreau-Dubois (1) , Jean-Claude Ray (1) , Myriam Doriat-Duban (1)

1 BETA - Bureau d'Économie Théorique et Appliquée

This article assesses whether and to what extent gender matters in one particular area of the civil law system, family law. Using a dataset of 2,000 child support decisions from French courts of appeal, we show that in a civil law system like that in France, the gender of the judge does seem to matter. We find that this influence is likely to manifest itself in two ways. First, our results show that female and male judges do not make the same decisions : comparatively to the latter, the former are more generous, fixing higher amounts of child support (the difference represents between 8% and 17% of the average amount of child support), and make more pro-mother decisions, regardless of whether the mothers are debtors or creditors. The magnitude of these differences is greater when the panel is composed of three female judges, comparatively to mixed or all-male panels.

Mots clés: Judicial decision-making; Gender; Family law

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société; Economies et finances

Bruno Jeandidier, Cécile Bourreau-Dubois, Jean-Claude Ray, Myriam Doriat-Duban. Does gender matter in the civil law judiciary ? Evidence from French child support court decisions. 2016. ⟨hal-02105210⟩